The Verse You Handed Over And Could Not Use

She wrote it on the back of an envelope, because that was what was on the bed table, and she wrote it in capitals.

He gave her Isaiah 41 verse 10. Fear thou not, for I am with thee; be not dismayed, for I am thy God. He gave it to her because it was the right one, and it was the right one for reasons he could have explained in detail: for what she is facing, for the particular flavor of the fear, for the fact that she is a woman who has spent her life being the strong one and is now in a bed being visited.

She read it back to him twice. She asked him to say the reference again so she got the numbers right. And she said, and he can still hear it, that she was going to put it where she could see it from the pillow.

That was on a Wednesday. He got in the car and drove out past the barrier and got about four hundred meters up the dual carriageway and had to stop in a lay-by.

Because here is what he could not get past. He gave her that verse out of a stock cupboard. He knows the verse. He knows what it does, the way a pharmacist knows what a drug does. He has watched it work in other people for years and he can select it accurately for a given kind of fear.

And it has not done one thing for him since March.

He reads it. He has read it recently on purpose, sitting at his own kitchen table, deliberately, the way you take a tablet. Nothing. The words are correct and they arrange themselves into a promise and the promise is one he would defend with his life, and it lands on him like a fact about somebody else's weather.

So he sat in a lay-by with the engine running and thought the sentence that has been with him ever since. I am selling something I cannot use.

He would not say that out loud to anybody. He knows what it sounds like. But it has been sitting on him since Wednesday, and it has a barb in it, and the barb is this: if it is not working on him, perhaps he is the reason it works on other people, which would make him a technique rather than a minister.

Count how many times he asks

Psalm 119 is the long one. A hundred and seventy six verses, all of them about the word of God, and it is usually treated as the work of a man in a settled and enthusiastic frame of mind.

Read it properly and it is nothing of the sort. It is written from affliction, over and over, by somebody who keeps saying so.

This is my comfort in my affliction: for thy word hath quickened me.Psalm 119:50

Now do the thing almost nobody does with that psalm, which is to count how many times the same man asks God to quicken him.

Nine times. Quicken me according to thy word. Quicken me in thy way. Quicken me after thy lovingkindness. Quicken thou me according to thy judgments. Nine separate requests, spread through the psalm, from the same man in the same document.

You do not ask nine times for a thing you already have in the room. The man who wrote the greatest poem about Scripture in human history spent most of it asking for the very thing verse 50 says has happened to him.

So hear this, in a lay-by with the engine running: you are not selling something you cannot use. That is not my kindness to you; it is what His word looks like from the inside of a man in affliction, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a count like that and takes the barb out of a man on a Wednesday afternoon.

Now look at the sentence you have been carrying.

The logic underneath it is that a word which does not currently warm you is a word you do not truly hold. That would be a reasonable rule if Scripture worked on people the way a lamp works on a room. It does not. Verse 50 is in the perfect tense: thy word hath quickened me. He is reporting something already done, historically, which is not currently being repeated, which is exactly why he is asking again nine times.

Which means the state you are in is the state the psalm was written from.

You are not a technique. His word never once suggests that its power on a hearer is generated by the condition of the one who hands it over, and the Holy Spirit is not routing something through you that He is withholding from you out of preference.

And here is the part I want to press, because it is the thing you have not let yourself think.

You gave her the right verse. Precisely the right one, chosen accurately, by a man who knows her, for a fear he understood. That is not the work of a pharmacist. That is nineteen years of knowing people and knowing Scripture, and it cost you something, and a woman is going to look at capital letters on an envelope from her pillow at three in the morning because you did it.

You have been living off a real thing while unable to taste it. That is a description of a dry season and never a description of a fraud, and Scripture has a whole psalm written from inside one, and the Holy Spirit put it in the Bible so that a man in a lay-by in March would have somewhere to sit.